The holiday season is the perfect time to market your business. Shopping for gifts is top of mind for many consumers and you don’t want to miss out. If you’ve built up a strong social media or newsletter presence, then you’re already off to a great start! Now it’s time to leverage those existing communities and try and engage a larger audience. Before you begin to brainstorm ideas, try and determine what type of metric you want to measure or increase, for example; online sales, engagement or in-store traffic. Then tailor your campaign to impact that specific metric. To get you off to a strong start, here are five holiday marketing ideas that you can use for your business!

1. Have an Instagram Hashtag Contest

Photo and video contests not only help you engage with your audience, they also help you reach a larger audience of individuals who are friends of your fans. Over the years, we have found that Instagram requires the lowest barrier of entry for fans and is the most effective way to generate a lot of participation. When creating the contest, try and make the hashtag resonate with your audience or align with the theme of your business. Try and make it short and sweet, instead of long and complicated. Search the hashtag on Instagram in order to see whether it is already a popular hashtag. Once you’ve found a unique hashtag, create your promo materials and begin your campaign. Make sure to set an end date to the contest, in order to encourage fans to participate before it’s too late. For the winner of the contest, again try and align the prize with your business or simply give the winner a gift card to your business.

2. Create Your Own Gift Guide

Whether you’re trying to show off products or services, a holiday gift guide can provide your business with a number of opportunities. They’re perfect for brick and mortar as well as online stores to showcase specific products or departments. They can also be created with a very limited budget and you can include important information such as your store address, directions and holiday hours. The easiest way to create a gift guide is within Powerpoint, then export as a PDF. Consider creating a unique landing page for the gift guide, using Unbounce or a similar service then create a unique Adwords campaign to drive downloads.

3. Design High Quality Facebook Boosted Posts

Creating high quality, shareable Facebook boosted posts is a sure fire way to engage are large targeted audience in a short amount of time. You could be promoting products, services, wins for the year, office antics, christmas recipes, local charities or anything else that is relevant to your business. Make sure the post has a clear message so fans know exactly what you’re posting and why. Challenge your team by trying to organically reach more people than who follow your page.

4. Have a 12 Days of Giveaways Contest

Everyone loves free stuff and 12 days of giveaways is the perfect method for generating new signups for your email newsletter list. Make sure each day of prizes are unique and relevant to your audience. Consider creating local prizes, that partner with other local businesses or simply give away the products or services that your business sells. Again, using Unbounce, create a simple landing page that collects first name, and email. Make sure people are clear that they are signing up for your newsletter and that they can unsubscribe at any time. If you promote the giveaways on social media, you will likely receive a high number of entrants.

5. Create Holiday Themed Display Ads

Display advertising is an effective way to reach a targeted audience that is already engaged with similar webpages to your own. By targeting the sites that your potential customers are looking at daily, effective display ads can drive high quality leads that convert. Make sure your ads are clickable, by creating a fake button or way for users to interact with the ads and test out a number of variations on the same ad (different colors, background image, button style).